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How An Old Pentium 4 System Runs With Ubuntu 10.04, 10.10

07-12-2010, 03:40 PM

Phoronix: How An Old Pentium 4 System Runs With Ubuntu 10.04, 10.10

Last October I wrote about running Ubuntu 9.10 with older PC hardware, but over this past weekend I restored an even older Phoronix test system to see how it runs with the most recent Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release and the very-latest Ubuntu 10.10 development snapshot in relation to the older Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS. This antiquated system has an Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, an 80GB IDE hard drive, and an ATI Radeon 9200PRO AGP graphics card.

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After reading the title I actually expected an interesting article, that'd tell me about the desktop-performance of such an old machine. Y'know, things like the general responsiveness (snappyness) and memory-consumption (swapping kills desktop-performance).
Well, I guess I should've known better. I should've know it'd only be a bunch of meanigless pts-graphs with pretty much zero value for anyone who's actually interested in how well such an old system fares as simple desktop-system with the latest Ubuntus.

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Thanks for testing that, but why there's only one test with OpenGL game? There should be at least Nexuiz, too.
I'm really curious how more open source games work on these Ubuntu versions on R200 card.
Looking at OpenArena if on other games the FPS rate drop would be simmilar there's now no doubt why my friends with R200 cards install Windows XP for games (even open source games) on the second disk partition with recent Kubuntu versions.
I'm resting hopes in Gallium3D, that might give me some more FPS in both desktop effects and games on two R300 cards in my P4.

Comment

After reading the title I actually expected an interesting article, that'd tell me about the desktop-performance of such an old machine. Y'know, things like the general responsiveness (snappyness) and memory-consumption (swapping kills desktop-performance).
Well, I guess I should've known better. I should've know it'd only be a bunch of meanigless pts-graphs with pretty much zero value for anyone who's actually interested in how well such an old system fares as simple desktop-system with the latest Ubuntus.

it works fine. i had such a box quite recently. and i wouldn't call it retired. it is a fine system for doing regular linux stuff.

Comment

After reading the title I actually expected an interesting article, that'd tell me about the desktop-performance of such an old machine. Y'know, things like the general responsiveness (snappyness) and memory-consumption (swapping kills desktop-performance).
Well, I guess I should've known better. I should've know it'd only be a bunch of meanigless pts-graphs with pretty much zero value for anyone who's actually interested in how well such an old system fares as simple desktop-system with the latest Ubuntus.

Well, looking at my PC with P4 3GHz with HT and 2,6GB usable DDR1 RAM, Kubuntu 10.04 (two copies of KDE 4.4.5 desktop running at the same time - multiseat with one copy on 1080p LCD TV and second on 1280x1024 LCD monitor + 800x600 PAL/NTSC TV) works really nice - starts slowly (~2min from boot to fully load both KDE copies - looking at bootchart) because of need to read everything to memory at start but then it's working really nice and responsiveness is nice, too (with most desktop effects enabled). I'm using mostly QT/KDE apps as they work better (at least loads faster) than GTK/Gnome apps started in KDE.
I use most KDE features with Nepomuk indexing on Virtuoso databases, desktop effects (on both seats), Kontact with Akonadi and system wide MySQL server for it's KDE databases, etc.

Comment

After reading the title I actually expected an interesting article, that'd tell me about the desktop-performance of such an old machine. Y'know, things like the general responsiveness (snappyness) and memory-consumption (swapping kills desktop-performance).
Well, I guess I should've known better. I should've know it'd only be a bunch of meanigless pts-graphs with pretty much zero value for anyone who's actually interested in how well such an old system fares as simple desktop-system with the latest Ubuntus.

I find it both hilarious and sad that you would rather read a bunch of completely subjective, essentially meaningless, adjectives. Well, here you go:

"Ubuntu was snappy, and light. It was much more responsive and quick when compared to other sluggish distros. The graphics were creamy, the audio was rich, and the default application selection was chewy and firm. Beware, swapping totally kills desktop performance."

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I expected some amount of CPU regressions (due to the huge number of drivers and stuff that went mainline in the kernel or gcc compiler complexity growing) but those were A LOT. What do you plp think of this?